To Plasma or not to Plasma?

Guest

I have been thinking about getting a plasma for the last 6 months and I have been reading up as much info as possible on them to make sure I don't waste £4000 on a bad choice. I was looking through the threads and everything I read seems to point to the Panasonic TH-42PW4B and the Toshiba 42WP16 (apparently the same, and quite frankly I can live with a Toshiba badge if it saves me 500 notes!) my only worry is the picture quality of the various inputs I have. I am planning to link my Denon DVD2800 with component inputs (to hopefully take advantage of the progressive scan), my SKY box with a RGB to VGA converter from John Sim, and my VCR via phono through my Denon AVR3802 amp. I have read that some people say the picture from the SKY box is not "technically perfect" on the plasma and this is worrying me a bit since most of the viewing with be from this device.

Does anyone have a similar setup to this and what do you think about the picture quality on the Panasonic/Toshiba when its connected in this way? Also how does it compare to the same inputs when viewed on a normal CRT television??

Standard Member

I am also looking to buy the same plasma screen, DVD player and RGB-VGA convertor that you have mentioned.

From all the information I have I would suggest you wont have too many problems, provided the following are investigated:

1) Plasma panels are extremely source sensitive - this is the issue with SKY - SKY's MPEg encoding is allegedly suspect, and therefore some digital artifacts etc can show up more so on a plasma than they would on a standard CRT. This is not to say that they dont exist anyway...it's just that the Plasma panel has a tendency to highlight inferior signals. In my opinion, this is livable....the odd momentary glitch on screen was just like using my On-Digital box! I would say...no worries here then.

2) I am guessing that you have the original Denon DVD2800? rather than the JUST released MKII. There are a number of issues reported with this player, the two I would investigate are:

a) Chroma Display issues. (a slight strobing can be seen on some patches of pure colours around static objects, hard to spot in my opinion, but there nevertheless. MKII player should get rid of this)

b) Lip Sync issues, my local AV dealer advises me that there can be some LipSync issues between the Panny/Tosh plasma panel and the Denon DVD2800 player. Again, this has been fixed....I think via a firmware patch to the DVD player.

In my case, Issue 1 is not a problem. Whilst I want a DVD2800 MKII player....some people are advising me to look instead at the Pioneer DV747, so Issue 2 is also not an issue for me.

I can only suggest you ask some questions from people who actually have similar hardware and try and see if these problems exist and how bad they are if so. Also, try and see what firmware level you have on your DVD player and possibly upgrade?

I hope this helps....for what it's worth I am going ahead just as soon as I have prepared my Living room and got the moolah together for the plasma......hopefully next month!

Guest

Thanks for the info, I hadn't realised there was a problem with the Denon DVD2800. I have had alook around the forums discussing DVD players and I managed to find considerable amounts of info on the various firmware upgrades for the Denon but I couldn't find any mentioning lip-sync isues or fixes! I am going to check with my dealer and see if he knows anything about which firmware upgrade will fix this problem.